What will be the correct form of the sentence?

2024

What will be the correct form of the sentence?

  1. A.

    The Spacex Company’s collected losses have come up for saturation levels this year.

  2. B.

    The Spacex Company’s collected losses have coming up for saturation levels this year.

  3. C.

    The Spacex Company’s collected losses have come to saturation levels this year.

  4. D.

    The Spacex Company’s collected losses have been coming up to saturation levels this year.

Attempted by 9 students.

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C

In English, the present-perfect tense is formed as ‘have/has + past participle’. For the irregular verb ‘come’, the past participle is ‘come’ itself, not the ‘-ing’ form ‘coming’ (which belongs to continuous tenses like ‘has been coming’). Separately, ‘come up’ and ‘come to’ are different phrasal verbs: ‘come up’ typically means to arise, occur, or approach (a topic that comes up, a deadline that is coming up), while ‘come to’ means to reach, arrive at, or amount to a specific figure or condition (a bill that comes to a certain amount).

Here the sentence needs to say that the company’s losses have reached a high figure (‘saturation levels’) by this year — a completed event expressed by the simple present perfect. That calls for ‘have come to saturation levels’, using the correct past-participle form ‘come’ together with the idiom that expresses reaching a specific level.

  • ‘…have come up for saturation levels…’ keeps ‘come up’, which conveys something arising or approaching rather than a figure being reached, so it does not carry the intended sense.

  • ‘…have coming up for saturation levels…’ breaks the present-perfect construction itself, since after ‘have’ English needs the past-participle form, not the ‘-ing’ form, so this phrasing is not grammatically valid regardless of which preposition follows.

  • ‘…have been coming up to saturation levels…’ is grammatically fine but changes more than the flawed idiom: shifting to the present-perfect continuous makes the rise sound still ongoing and unresolved, and it keeps ‘up’, so it does not give the single, minimal fix — replacing ‘come up’ with ‘come to’ while leaving the tense unchanged — that best matches the stated, completed sense of the losses having already reached a level ‘this year’.

So the only version that is both grammatically well-formed and semantically correct uses ‘have come to saturation levels’.

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